In downtown Albuquerque, Adam Hammer is showing me around the building that houses his newly launched venture shop, Roadrunner Venture Studios—an old mattress factory turned open-plan office space where he hopes he can persuade scientists, engineers, and deep-tech founders to come and build companies.
Hammer walks me over to a wall to the left of the front door—pointing to a graphic of technologies or companies that had their roots right here in New Mexico, but then moved elsewhere once they started to scale. Microsoft is the prominent example: Bill Gates and Paul Allen started building their first microcomputer in Albuquerque before they moved the company to Bellevue, Wash., so they could be closer to the West Coast’s talent pool.
“What we’re trying to do is continue a legacy here in New Mexico of bold ideas—imaginative people,” Hammer says. This time around—he’s hoping his team can persuade founders to stay.
Roadrunner is the first venture studio spinoff of America’s Frontier Fund (AFF), the venture capital arm of the policy- and education-focused nonprofit funded by the likes of Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. Roadrunner is the first of a series of studios AFF plans to scatter across the country, with the intention of helping scientists or researchers from national, university, or corporate laboratories get capital, recruiting help, and the resources they need to turn their work into viable commercial products. Behind it all is a mission to ensure that the U.S. continues to be dominant in innovation.
Albuquerque is where things will start—in part because of its proximity to Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Lab, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the University of New Mexico. But also because the state’s sovereign wealth fund, the New Mexico State Investment Council (SIC), two weeks ago agreed to invest $50 million as an anchor check for Roadrunner’s first venture capital fund, approximately $20 million of which will go directly into Roadrunner itself. The sovereign wealth fund—which started making venture capital investments a few years ago and has invested in deep-tech-focused funds like Lux Capital, Playground Global, and Anzu Partners—has asked these funds in limited partner agreements to at least look at companies based in New Mexico. In the case of Roadrunner, it’s asking the studio to build companies in New Mexico.
“I obviously wanted it to start here, and was willing to anchor the fund to make sure that occurred,” says Chris Cassidy, who oversees the private equity investments of New Mexico’s sovereign wealth fund.
The premise of Roadrunner is to bridge the gap—what Hammer calls the “valley of death”—between the technology being invented and funded in laboratories in New Mexico and elsewhere, and turning the projects into commercially viable companies. Right now, Roadrunner is working with labs like Nokia Bell Labs, the University of Michigan, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Roadrunner’s new general partner, Mike Mettler, who is joining Roadrunner as part of this new fund, was out at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California last week, Hammer says, meeting directly with scientists and assessing which ideas might be ready for company creation. Hammer is hoping to get various stakeholders on the same page, from local municipalities and state governments to other venture capital firms. He touts Hydrosonics, one of the studio’s first three companies, which is building electrolysis technologies to enable affordable hydrogen fuel. Hydrosonics’ founder, Luis Chavez, PhD, had been a researcher at Los Alamos National Lab before starting a company with Roadrunner last year.
“We met Luis in one of our scouting trips,” Hammer says, explaining how Chavez moved to Albuquerque, set up shop here, and within a year had raised approximately $875,000 in venture capital as well as non-dilutive funding from New Mexico’s Economic Development Department.
Gilman Louie, the CEO of America’s Frontier Fund who formerly ran the CIA-funded investment firm In-Q-Tel, says that Roadrunner Venture Studios is part of the investment side of AFF’s business, and that there is “no crossover” and “no financial interest” among its nonprofit donors, including Schmidt, Thiel, or Cuban. “All of our philanthropy is kept separate from all of our for-profit activities,” he says, noting that Roadrunner will be squarely focused on working with scientists who need capital.
The problem with any kind of new studio or venture capital firm is that it can take a long time—sometimes a decade—to actually deliver meaningful results or returns. In the near term, SIC’s Cassidy will be monitoring how many companies and how much talent moves to Albuquerque as a result of Roadrunner, and is hopeful that Albuquerque, with its renowned Christmas chile sauce and more affordable real estate, can have a startup scene that takes off—and sticks around—too.
“What we’re trying to do is build this center of gravity here,” Hammer says.
